


Sidus

by Katadenza



Category: Evillious Chronicles
Genre: (most likely) Canon Divergent, Backstory, Gen, Headcanon, Parental Death (and all its consequences), Survivor Guilt, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-01-22 19:23:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12489056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katadenza/pseuds/Katadenza
Summary: Or, In Which We Learn of The Daughter of Stars.  One-shot.





	Sidus

**Author's Note:**

> I was trying to get all my pre-project!Eve headcanons down in one doc, and then things kinda got out of control. Whoops.  
> Honestly, I wonder what kind of hubris this is, releasing such a fic when the MotHeavenly novel is being infomined _right now,_ but it can't be helped. I might as well get this out all the same because I worked hard on it, dammit. I gave it my best shot, and that's all that matters. Even if MotHeavenly josses this entire fic in the next few days, we had a good run, didn't we?  
>  I’ve tried my best to keep everything canon compliant as much as possible up to but not including MotHeavenly (obviously). The only contradictory things I can see are probably the parts with Michaela, but I’m very attached to that particular headcanon so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> Enjoy!

Who _are_ you, Eve Zvezda Moonlit?

 

You were born in the village of Nemu, on the date August 31st, 339, under the old calendar.

 

You grew up with your mother, a working shaman. You never knew your father. You were told he was a Leviantan mage, but nothing about why he was gone. You asked, and poked, and prodded, but the more and more you did the more you noticed the weariness in your mother's eyes. The sadness. The grief. Eventually, you learned to stop asking. You didn't like seeing her like that.

 

It only occurred to you many years later that your father might not have died. That he might have left you and your mother behind. That if he had died, your mother simply would have told you and you would at least know his name, as she was never the type to shield you from the concept of death. But still, it would've been nice to know who he was. You carry not his name, but your mother's: _Zvezda_

 

The Zvezda Clan of Nemu was once a proud and prestigious bloodline, with raw magic potential nearly unrivaled. Knowledge of its secrets passed from mother to daughter, going back and back and back, to what some even whisper is the forest god Held himself.

 

Of course, by the time you learned this, it was just you and your mother left.

 

And yet, even with your clan's glory decayed and fading, your mother was determined for line of tradition to continue, unbroken. She began to teach you all she knew, from the moment you could walk and talk, about your birthright, your inheritance.

 

Nemu was your clan's ancestral home, and in return your life was to be dedicated in service to its people. You became your mother's assistant in anything she did. Making potions, gathering ingredients, tending to the small garden of herbs and vegetables in the backyard, dealing with the townspeople who were often sick and tired and stressed when they came to you... your mother taught you everything you knew, and eventually, those skills would be how you would manage to survive, when she was gone.

 

It wasn't easy. It was never easy. Your mother was not one to coddle you in matters such as magic, especially when your powers began to bloom into their full, terrifying potential. _Control_ , she insisted, guiding your hands, pressing against your shoulders. _You must learn control._ For even you could see the fear began to bloom in the village at your budding strength, the sensation of reality at your fingertips ready to bow to your whims. And you were a child, a child who knew not of prejudice and consequences but would eventually _learn_ , would learn the day you went to your mother and asked _why are they afraid of me_?

 

And your mother would sigh, and hold you close, and begin to explain the nature of your family's blessing... and curse. For blessed as you are to be able to manipulate magic at the highest caliber, cursed you are as well to be alone and apart from those who could not.

 

In hindsight, your mother had never bothered to encourage you to play with the other children.

 

It wasn't fair, you had whined. And your mother had shushed you and said that simply how life was. That you had to endure. _But_ , she added, with a wistful smile on her face _, I heard that things are a little bit better in Levianta._

 

You didn't understand her at the time. And so you endured.

 

It wasn't so bad, really. No matter how hard she made you work, how harsh she was with your training, you loved her, and she loved you. You remember her brushing your hair every morning, tying it into pigtails that would eventually become twintails as your hair grew longer and longer. You remember breakfasts and lunches and dinners lovingly made with your favorite food, spring onions. (She was always a bit amused that you couldn't get enough of the vegetable, but you couldn't understand why.) You remember snuggling up to her every night as she read to you from the book of magic your family had been writing since the dawn of time, reminding you that there was a blank space at very end for you and your daughters to write in your _own_ magical discoveries, in the future.

 

You remember her taking you on your first trip across Heldogort, which would become a biannual tradition for you as your mother bought and traded for ingredients she couldn't get anywhere else. Your mother spoke with the shopkeepers and merchants as old friends, introducing you to them as you were enraptured by the exotic merchandise. You saw endless fields of green as you zigzagged across the country, through mountain passes and rolling hills. You learned to swim in Lake of Amusement, splashing in the water merrily as your mother gathered trauben fruit nearby for the two of you to eat later. You remember nights spent at the side of the road, stargazing with your mother in an open wagon that was older than both of you, feeling completely secure as you knew that your mother would never allow either of you would come to harm.

 

But most of all, you remember Held's forest.

 

Besides Nemu, it was the place you felt most at home. You loved the cool wind on your face and the sound of the tree branches rustling as you ran through the forest, shrieking with laughter. You stared in awe at the great tree in the center of the forest, your sense of magic tingling as you and your powers felt small and insignificant, and yet, _welcomed_. Here, your mother told you stories about spirits and gods, on how they created the world and all its creatures, on how to walk among them with respect and yet with dignity, for this world was made for all of you. And here, one night, in a small forest clearing, your mother taught you your family's closest secret: the secret of the stars.

 

You made your first friend in Held's forest. It was a small green robin who accepted your offering of bread and perched on your shoulder, examining you curiously. You spoke freely, telling it all about you and your life, your worries, your hopes, your dreams. When your mother taught you new spells, grander ones she wouldn't dare teach you back home, the robin was always the first to witness your practice attempts, good or bad. Whenever you and your mother arrived in the forest, it always showed up, without fail, no matter how many months have passed since your last visit. While you grew, the robin always stayed the same: same size, same feathers, same penchant for trauben fruit, same restless energy. Your mother called it a forest spirit. You were inclined to believe her, so you never gave it a name. It was simply your first (and only) friend.

 

When you were ten, your mother died.

 

Your mother had sent you to buy food that day, exhausted after having assisted in delivering a child late into the night. You took your time as you went around the village, like you always did. Looking back, you barely remembered smelling the fresh pastries at the bakery; resisting the temptation to buy the seeds that produced such beautiful flowers at the florist; trying to talk to the other children as they stopped what they were doing as they stared at you, silently, a few even edging away. All you remember is coming home with your little basket to find your mother collapsed on the floor.

 

All the medical knowledge you had, every spell your mother taught you, none of them could help someone who was already dead. Not even if you were the strongest magic user in the country, or the world. You learned that the hard way.

 

And yet, as you numbly watched the townspeople remove your mother’s body from your home, you still thought you could have done something. That it was _your_ fault for taking so long, as you discovered that your mother had died by confusing poisonous berries for their beneficial lookalike. You could have saved her. You had the book. You had all your mother’s things. You could have stopped her from using those berries. You could have found a way. You could have _been there_.

 

But you weren’t.

 

They buried your mother in the village graveyard. Besides you, only a handful attended the funeral, those who came to your mother at their most desperate. They sent their regards, gave you a few sympathetic looks, and left you to your home that seemed even bigger and emptier with just you there. That night, it hit you that you were completely and totally on your own.

 

You woke up the next morning, unnerved by how normal everything seemed to be, and wondered how the sun could still rise when your mother was dead. You got up, tying up your hair into twintails ( _just as your mother did_ ) with shaking hands. You walked around your house in a trance, hoping to see your mother working in the garden, or stirring something in the cauldron, or writing at her desk. But you didn’t. You were utterly alone. And on top of that, hungry.

 

You managed to scrape together your meals that day, and the next, and the next. (You avoid berries for a long time after that day.) You don’t exactly learn how to feed yourself as much as learn how to keep yourself from starving, and _that_ , as you were forced to learn as well, meant a lot more besides learning how to use a frying pan.

 

No one helped you. No one came over to check if you were all right, if the now-orphaned Zvezda girl was eating well, if she was getting along fine without her mother. The first visitor you got arrived on the sixth day after the funeral, a farmer who had been cut by his sickle. He had stared at you expectantly as you answered the door, seemingly unfazed by the fact that the village shaman was now a ten-year old girl who had been living on stale bread and cheese for the past six days. Silently, you invited him in, disinfected the laceration, as your mother had taught you, and tried to keep your face from betraying your fear of making a fatal mistake as you performed the spell to seal it up. The operation went flawlessly, and the farmer handed you a bag of coins ( _your mother’s usual fee,_ you realized with a pang), and left your home without a word.

 

As you stared at at the bag of coins in your hand, you realized that this was to be your life from then on.

 

So you endured.

 

The village had begun to move on from your mother’s death, and you were forced to run with it whether you liked it or not. They came to you expecting your mother’s prowess, and you had to smile and reassure them you knew exactly what you were doing as you healed their every ill and every need for magical assistance. Meanwhile on the inside, you were screaming and crying because oh Held, oh Levia, you are not your mother and you barely knew anything and _how in the world were you supposed to do this?!_ The book of your ancestors became utterly indispensable now as you pored over it day after day, beginning a frantic course of self-study as your training had been cut brutally short. The fact that your magical potential was incredibly high made things a bit easier, but not by much.

 

It was all up to you now, you and your magical skill, to learn how to do things and do them right. And you _did_. You learned how to cook, how to clean, how to keep the house from falling apart (which was a lot harder than it looked given that you nearly blew yourself up half the time) and yourself alive. For you knew that you couldn’t give up, _shouldn’t_ give up, and that if your mother was looking down on you from the Heavenly Yard, she had to see you standing on your own two feet, living up to everything she expected of you.

 

For you are Eve, daughter of Aklia, sole living heir to the Zvezda name, and you were determined to _survive_.

 

That, however, didn’t mean that you couldn’t also be terrified every step of the way.

 

The prime example would be around four months after your mother’s death. You had been putting it off as much as you could, but you couldn’t have avoided it any longer: you were running out of supplies. You knew exactly what to do, but you didn’t want to do it. You _really_ didn’t want to do it, but you didn’t have a choice. You had no idea what Nemu would do to a useless shaman, and you didn’t want to find out.

 

So you forced yourself to pack enough provisions for two-weeks travel (which, to your ten-year-old self, meant as much food and water as you could get your hands on), put up the sign on the door like your mother always did, push the old wagon out of the shed and climb in, and infused your magic and will into the wagon itself, just as you had also seen your mother do. You made it roll slowly, down the street, out of Nemu, and onto the road leading deeper into Heldogort.

 

You even made yourself go faster, just so you couldn’t change your mind and turn back.

 

You spent that entire journey as a bundle of nerves. Every rustle in the long grass was a wild animal waiting to attack, every caravan was a group of bandits ready to rob you blind and worse. The fact that you were _actually_ attacked by bandits did not help you at all, and after a frantic chase and gratuitous use of the bear-killing spell ( _which you should use in only the gravest of emergencies,_ your mother had reminded you over and over), you ended up curling up in a corner of the wagon nearly out of your mind with terror. Too scared to move. Too scared to breathe, as the group pulled up right next to your wagon and saw nothing, thanks to that _other_ skill your mother taught you. Too scared to even cry, even after they were long gone and the moon and stars began to shine above you.

 

But eventually, the sun rose. And you kept going.

 

Even in somewhat safe territory, your troubles did not end there. You noticed too late that you even if you remembered to bring currency, you didn’t bring anything else to bargain with. You must have looked pathetic, standing on tip-toe to reach the counter tops, trying to negotiate with people who towered over you long after your money pouch had gone empty.

 

You somehow managed to get what you needed, out of a combination of your mother’s name and sheer pity. But you were gently reminded that next time, they would not be so generous. And you, who at that point was numb from exhaustion, wondered privately if there would even _be_ a next time. (Of course, you already knew the answer.)

 

Even the Lake of Amusement wasn’t as fun as it used to be, now that your mother was gone. You just spent an afternoon on the shore, looking out into the water, not even bothering to swim.

 

But you still kept going.

 

You eventually made it to Held’s Forest, against all odds. The robin was there as always, looking at you in concern. You brought the wagon to a halt, trying to comprehend that you were _there_. That you somehow weren’t dead. That the robin was on your shoulder, waiting for your usual offer of bread.

 

You managed to get ten paces from the wagon before you sank to your knees, the horror of everything that’s happened finally catching up with you, and you cried, and cried, and cried.

 

When you thought you were completely cried out, you found that the robin had never even left your side, and you felt like crying again.

 

Eventually, you pulled yourself together, explaining everything to what must have been a very confused robin. You wondered if it even understood you and your petty human problems, if it really was a spirit of the great god Held.

 

The entire journey back, you had all the time to contemplate how alone you truly were.

 

Besides the robin, you just didn’t have any friends. It wasn’t for lack of trying, either. You liked to talk to people, you really did. It’s just that none of them really liked talking back. You noticed it whenever you walked by. Conversations would halt, some would stare, and an atmosphere of tension would always set in. You’ve long gotten used to one-word replies and awkward smiles, even appreciated them, because usually you got nothing at all.

 

But you kept trying anyway. You remained cheery, kept trying to initiate something, anything at all, even if you were implicitly rejected over and over again.

 

You knew why they were afraid. You yourself felt your powers grow rapidly, in the years after your mother’s death. You had begun learning the more advanced spells in the book and found you could do them with a frightening amount of ease. You always remembered your mother’s warnings, but it still felt exhilarating to feel that much magic flow out of your being, doing whatever you wished.

 

But you only learned just _how_ afraid they were shortly after you turned thirteen. The village council had summoned you, and you felt very intimidated as you sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by somber-faced adults.

 

You were told that since you were no longer a child ( _you haven’t been a child since you were ten years old_ ), you were now old enough to know and abide by the rules of the village. That even though the Zvezdas have served Nemu faithfully for generation upon generation, the village still kept them firmly at arm's length “for the protection of the non-magical population”. You learned then, your restrictions. Magic that was never to be performed within the village borders, the bear-killing spell among them. As they read the spells out to you, you saw the council members shifting nervously in their seats, eyes shifting to you, the clock, and the door. You realized that none of them wanted to be in the same room as you.

 

They told you that the consequences for noncompliance would be swift and unforgiving: immediate expulsion and exile from the village, forever.

 

Your mother had never told you about this.

 

So you agreed. What else could you have done? It wasn’t as if you had any reason to use those abilities within the village anyway.

 

They dismissed you, and it was as if they couldn’t get you out of their sight fast enough.

 

_Things are better in Levianta_ , your mother had said. Were they, really? You began to get more and more curious about that city, the one that everyone spoke of with tales so fantastical it seemed almost mythical. Some of its technology found its way to your village, sure. You even had an old radio back home. But what you fixated on was what you learned through conversations you managed to listen in on, when people thought you weren’t there: In Levianta, half of the population could use magic. In Levianta, there were people like _you_.

 

What were things really like in Levianta? As you grew older, you began to daydream about the possibilities. You began to ask the traders and merchants who passed to and from the city, the only ones you could knew would actually have a full conversation with you. None of them were magical, but apparently magic-users were prevalent enough in Levianta ( _the Magic Kingdom_ , they called it) that they knew quite a bit on how they were treated there.

 

In Levianta, they said, those who could use magic were educated so they could gain full and thorough knowledge of their abilities, unlocking all their potential. They were actually part of the elite, working in tandem with these other people called “scientists” for the technological and magical development of the city as a whole.

 

The traders knew what you were. You’ve even given them a few demonstrations, both unintentional and intentional, on the strength of your magic. And so, inevitably, almost every visit they would extend the offer for you to join them, to move to Levianta to see all its wonders and leave Nemu behind.

 

And you would hesitate.

 

It was tempting. It was so very tempting. You had read your ancestors’ book from cover to cover at that point, and learned everything that you could learn from it. You were now, at that point, a competent shaman after much blood, sweat, and tears. But...

 

_You could be more_.

 

Your life was stable. You had no friends, but you were doing fine enough on your own. You could even go on your resourcing-gathering trips without much incident (or at least, without much fear of an incident). It was safe to say that you knew what you were doing around ninety-five percent of the time. You were living just as your mother did, as your grandmother did, and her _own_ mother, back and back and back.

 

And yet, you somehow felt unfulfilled.

 

But still, could you really leave all that behind? Leaving the village without a shaman? Abandoning your legacy, just like that?

 

You always said you would think about it, whenever they asked. And you would still be thinking about it, long after they left.

 

Maybe you were a coward, for never saying yes. Maybe you weren’t, and you knew deep down that you really belonged in Nemu. Really. You had better things to do than entertain a childish fantasy. _Really._

 

So you tended to your garden, now with a section filled with beautiful plants that your mother never would have let you get as they were pretty much useless, otherwise. You read terrible romance novels, being amused over the fact that here you were, fantasizing over princes and rogues when you couldn’t even get a single friend (and honestly, you would take the friend over the prince any day). You sang to cheesy pop songs on the old radio while doing your chores, and simply sat and listened when the synthesized sounds gave way to those of an orchestra. You even made yourself spring onion soup occasionally, just to make yourself feel better.

 

And at night you would climb to the roof and look at the stars, wondering if this is all you would ever be.

 

When you were sixteen years old, a day before you were set to leave for another resource-gathering trip, you heard someone knocking on your door.

 

Strange. You had never met anyone with blue hair before.

 

The outsider (and he had to be an outsider, given that his outfit was one of the most ridiculous ones you’ve ever seen) introduced himself as Adam Moonlit, a scientist and representative from the Magic Kingdom Levianta.

 

Well. _That_ got your attention.

 

You invited him in, and found that you both liked coffee with sugar. Which was a bit worrying, since you had so little of either left. You sat and sipped your drink as Mr. Moonlit explained the situation. You blinked. What he said... it seemed unreal. You shook your head, and you caught a hint of panic in your visitor’s eyes, which unsettled you, just a bit.

 

You explained that such a choice ( _A prophecy? A mother of incredible magical power? What?!)_ was too huge to be made on the spot. You said that you were about to leave the next day on an important trip, and you would think about it then. You told him to return in two weeks, which was when you would also return with your final decision.

 

Thankfully, Mr. Moonlit seemed completely understanding, and the two of you parted on cordial terms.

 

Of course, you immediately rethought your impression of the man when you found him stowed away on your wagon, three days away from Nemu.

 

And from then on, things certainly took a turn for the _interesting._

 

_**commencer.** _


End file.
